Well That’s Overdramatic)
Moby Dick is a lot of fun to read. The prose is grandiose, and the wordplay is incredibly imaginative. If I’m being honest, sometimes the text is so rich that it washes over me thicker than I can understand it…but I still feel encompassed by the intended atmosphere even so. One of my favorite examples of its passages reads as follows:
He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
What wonderful imagery: a chest for a cannon and a heart for a shell! But is there a reason to such thick poetry? Could this have been expressed in a more straightforward manner?
Honestly, it seems a hard thing to do. What sort of succinct, easily comprehensible sentence would have captured the same meaning as the original?
Ahab was extremely angry, so much so that he felt as if his heart might burst right out from his chest.
For one, I still ended up using a hyperbole, that of a heart bursting from a chest, though I wrote it in a far more common form. But even so, it just does not have the same punch as what came before, and no matter of adding verys (Ahab was very, very, very…angry) would ever make the second form as impactful as the first. It isn’t really quantifiable, there is just something about poetry that hits a depth of emotion that can’t be captured otherwise.
Truth Through Untruths)
This is a key misunderstanding between father and son in the novel and film Big Fish. Edward Bloom has only ever told his son stories from his past in the form of tall tales. He refuses to ever give a straight answer, always spinning impossibly fantastic yarns instead. It get so that when the son grows up, he feels that he doesn’t know his father at all.
As frustrated as the son is with his father’s style, Edward feels just as frustrated with his son’s more practical approach to sharing events.
He would have told it wrong anyway. All the facts and none of the flavor.
Because when Edward Bloom tells you a story, he isn’t trying to explain the events in the way that a surveillance camera would have captured them, he wants to explain them in the way his heart felt at the time. As the title suggests, it is the same impetus behind all “big fish” stories. No, the trout I caught wasn’t really 200 pounds, but it felt that way when I was tugging on the line.
When two lovers break up, they probably don’t really think that they will never be happy again…but in this moment that is how it feels. We resort to hyperbole to communicate the truths that actually true statements cannot.
Quality Prose)
Of course, not just any hyperbole will do. It is one thing to know that the stirrings of the heart can only be communicated by the alchemy of a poet, and it is another to actually mix that concoction together! I desperately wish I could have seen the past drafts of Herman Melville’s novel. Did the idea of chest as a cannon and a heart as a shell come to him immediately, or did he try to evoke that sensation many times before finding one that actually captured it well?
In the novel I’m working on now, I mulled over a particular sequence for a long while, trying to find the right way to express it properly. I wanted to capture the sensation of being condemned, made an outcast, and deemed no longer fit for society. The sensation of watching the world continue, but without you. I wanted to capture that, but not with so many words. After many rewrites I am have the following:
Here you are, one of the base and the damned, the buried and the forgotten. The debris of all mankind.
Now when I consider the prose that I quoted from Moby Dick at the start of this post, I have to admit that my own turn-of-phrase is far inferior. I don’t think my sentences are painfully awkward, but they surely are not exceptional.
How am I to fix that? Well, that’s the frustrating thing about poetic hyperbole, there isn’t a formula for guaranteed success. The fact is that coming up with a new and evocative way to describe something is hard. It just is. This is the reason we constantly cycle back to classic idioms, no matter how cliche they have become. “My heart is breaking” is undoubtedly overused, but just try to replace it with something better!
My hope, and suspicion, is that one gets better at prose simply through exercising it. By trying many times to say things more cleverly, eventually I will.
Story As Hyperbole)
Of course sometimes the exaggeration is not merely a single phrase in a story. Often an entire story is itself a dramatic expression of some underlying theme. James Bond films emulate the popular image of masculinity in a very exaggerated way. Dr. Strangelove lampoons the insanity of mutually assured destruction in an excessively ridiculous narrative. The Parable of the Good Samaritan presents an extreme case of neglect to convey the worthiness of being a good neighbor.
Though none of these stories is categorized as a fantasy, they still utilize extreme circumstances to emphasize their point. We don’t ever expect to find ourselves in the same literal situation as any of these main characters, but we will have moments where we must depend on the same principles that they do. In our own way we may need to stand up to the bully like James Bond, speak out against self-destructing hate like that in Dr. Strangelove, or help someone we considered an enemy like the Good Samaritan. And though the reality of those moments might be simple, to us they will feel just as epic as those fictional stories.
I’d like to explore that idea with my next short story. In it I wish to take a concept we have all experienced at some point: that of being utterly exhausted: body, mind, and soul. The account that I give will eclipse any level of sleep-deprivation that I have personally experienced, yet I hope it will still ring true to anyone who has felt thoroughly fatigued. With my first entry, I will be setting the stage for that exhaustion. Come back on Thursday to see how it turns out.
Give Me Pen and Paper 